Arctic environmental security and abrupt climate change - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 109

through the Navy's Task Force Climate (National Research Council 2011)
and the Air Force's Minerva Program. The larger need for environmental
security is of an open-source, international effort to provide research space
for the growing environmental security community. Certain research centres
already exist and provide international forums, but resource constraints and
organization prevent such centres from drawing upon the larger academic,
business and government communities of analysts in a systemic way. It may
be argued that the best way to approach a complex set of systems with emer-
gent order is to create a strategic foresight system with similar attributes.
Interdisciplinary 'black swan' research is more likely to be successful if it can
bypass organizational barriers and national parochialism, and instead perhaps
create the sort of epistemic community that was successful in solving other
transnational environmental issues (Litfin 1999).
Conclusion
Definitions for security (both energy and environmental) and climate change
need to be constructed in such a way that policymakers have incentives to
pursue mitigation and adaptation, not merely to focus on GHG emissions
as the only suitable goal and outcome of the current United Nations cli-
mate negotiation (UNFCC) process. They must also allow integration of
energy and environment as key concepts, both as contributing to forcing of
environmental systems and as the possible solutions for cooperation. Such
concepts will be inherently complex, involving large amounts of uncertainty
and illustrating scenarios that contain multiple feedback effects and cascad-
ing perturbations ('ripple effects'). Simple models and a continued view that
environmental systems lay outside of human activity impose artificial barriers
on both understanding and solutions.
The point of this exercise is not to provide immediate and concrete
answers. It is unlikely that this is even possible, owing to the large amount of
uncertainty inherent in the discussion. Rather, we need to provide workable
definitions and frameworks for approaching policy, ones that break from past
Cold War-era definitions that assume state security, deliberate action and
violent conflict. Should these definitions be used, we will be looking at the
wrong places and at the wrong times.
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Pierrehumbert, R. T., Rhines, P. B., Stocker, T. F., Talley, L. D. and Wallace, J. M. (2003)
'Abrupt climate change', Science , 299:2005-10.